Group’s annual report: married, mar-
riage, wedding, couple, boyfriend,
girlfriend, spouse, husband and wife.
The word partner does appear
three times—but only in reference
to the company’s business partners.
Tinder, Match and OKCupid do
not want to get you off the market.
They want to transform you into life-
long shoppers. Match Group admits
as much in its annual report, boast-
ing that “successful experiences...
drive repeat usage.”
Translation: Start dating someone
terrific on Tinder, and you’ll keep
returning to the app to find someone
even more terrific.
If Match Group really wanted to
help you get married, they’d focus
on connecting you with people you
already know from real life. Surveys
show, for example, that couples who
meet at work marry at a very high
rate—as high as 30 percent.
Given the complications sur-
rounding workplace dating, and
COVID-19 of course, wouldn’t it
be great if there were an app that
revealed mutual attraction between
co-workers before anyone risked get-
ting sent to HR?
Connecting singles within the
same social sphere was, in fact,
Hinge’s business model back before
it was acquired by Match Group. In
Hinge’s early days, users needed to
be friends or friends-of-friends with
one another on Facebook before the
Hinge app would ever match them.
Hinge’s Facebook requirement
paid off romantically for its users:
According to Bustle, Hinge was the
most mentioned dating app in The
New York Times wedding section in
- But then in June 2018—which
was the same month Match Group
acquired a majority stake in Hinge—
Hinge announced it was eliminat-
ing the Facebook requirement and
adopting a more open-ended model.
Something else happened in June
2018: It was the last time Hinge put out
a press release touting itself as “the #1
mobile-first dating app mentioned in
the NY Times Wedding section.”
Ơ Adapted from make your move:
the new science of dating and why
women are in charge. Jon Birger is
a former senior writer at fortune
and the author of date-onomics,
which, along with make your move,
can be purchased through Ama-
zon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound,
Walmart and other retailers. Birger
can be reached at jonbirger.com or on
Twitter at @jonbirger1.
WORKING IT “Wouldn’t it be great if
there were an app that revealed mutual
attraction between co-workers before
anyone risked getting sent to HR?”
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NEWSWEEK.COM 45